Some people are reporting seeing the following error when opening the game:

I have received reports of this occurring in both Office 2010 and 2013 however I am unable to recreate the bug on my testing machines. I am now asking for volunteers who are using systems that are encountering the above bug to provide feedback on updated versions so that I can try to tackle this. If you’d like to volunteer please let me know at with your operating system and excel version and I shall add you to the tester list.

I am very pleased to announce the first launch of my new mobile game Glyphs! Make sure to download it free! It’s currently available on Android devices in Canada, launching to more platforms and territories soon! Like the Facebook page to find out when Glyphs is coming to you!

You may have heard about the recent viral game 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli. It’s a perfect blend of addictive and frustrating. It’s a simple game where you match 2-like numbers placed next to each other to create a new tile of their sums. The goal is to get a tile of the value 2048.

Well now there is a version playable entirely in Microsoft Excel! Co-developed by Peter Bartholomew and Petros Chatzipantazis, they bring all the fun of 2048 to a spreadsheet! You can download the excel version of 2048 for free here! The VBA is all open source so if you’re an advanced Excel wizard, have a look at the code to see how this all came together.

Candy Number Crunch Saga is a stock trading simulation game that runs entirely in Microsoft Excel!

Candy Number Crunch Saga takes place in the not too distant future where King.com (KING) has had a successful IPO. The burden is on you, brave stock trader, to invest wisely and become richer beyond your wildest dreams!

Key Features:

Over 35 unique (and sometimes wacky) news events that impact the stock price. Every game is different!

Realistic stock transactions.

A real-time stock ticker.

The entire game runs in a Microsoft Excel workbook.

This game was made in my spare time over the course of 4 days for Candy Jam. The game is open-source so feel free to explore the source code!

In a year that saw BlackBerry’s fortunes take yet another turn for the worse, it was often easy to feel pessimistic about the state of technological innovation in Canada. Fortunately for us, people like Cary Walkin exist.

Mr. Walkin, a chartered accountant, decided to build a dungeon-crawler role-playing video game all by himself. Now, this on its own would be a fairly impressive endeavour. But no, Mr. Walkin took things a step further by building this video game entirely within the confines of Microsoft Excel.

Now you may ask: Could Mr. Walkin have spent his time and ample talent doing something more worthwhile than building a video game using only spreadsheet macros? We say no. Keep on fighting the good fight, Cary.

I was going to hold off on uploading this until I had more animations in the game but I felt the desire to share. So this is a early preview of what will be coming in the future. Please forgive the choppiness and lack of audio, in the future I will use better screen capture software.

Disclaimer: The following tutorial requires Conditional Formatting which is a feature of Excel 2010 and greater. If you are using an older version of Excel, please note that formatting will not work correctly for you.

This article is part of a series called “VBA4Play”, written in conjunction with Excel game developer, Cary Walkin, for his blog. Many thanks to Cary for inviting me to write a few tutorials for his series.

Today, we’ll be focusing on how you can turn regions of your spreadsheet into a map for a game. This will be similar to the illuminated pathway featured in the bottom-right of the spreadsheet maze shown below.